For those who shrewdly invest a small portion of their monthly salary in subscribing to The Wisden Cricketer, a treat is in store this month: some ten pages of the latest issue have been devoted to the runs-machine that is Mark Ramprakash, who starts his nineteenth county season this week on 97 first-class hundreds. Those who don't subscribe really ought to dash out and buy the magazine. The fact that I wrote the article is only one reason.
As and when Ramps gets to the landmark, he will be the 25th cricketer in the history of the game to score 100 centuries and the first since Graeme Hick in 1998. I spoke to three of those in the 100 Club - Hick, Graham Gooch and Tom Graveney - about how they reached the landmark. Hick scored his 99th and 100th hundreds in the same game to avoid nerves; Graveney reached his with a mistimed hook over short leg; while Gooch had the agony of thinking he had reached the landmark only for the statisticians to dock one that he had scored on the South African rebel tour.
I also spoke to Dennis Amiss, who returned my call too late for it to make the magazine but his story is worth telling here. Amiss, the Warwickshire and England batsman, got his 100th hundred against Lancashire in 1987 on the last day of a drawn match. "The game was gone and we should have finished early but Clive Lloyd [the Lancs captain] was kind enough to let me have an extra 15 minutes to get the runs," Amiss said. A few matches earlier, when still on 99 hundreds, Amiss played another county and had got into the 80s. "Then a ball climbed on me, took the faintest edge and was caught by the wicketkeeper," he recalled. "I walked, but David Shepherd [the umpire] told me later, 'You should have stayed and got your hundred. I wouldn't have given you out.'"
Ramprakash may well be the last to get to the landmark. Justin Langer has 80, Matthew Hayden 79 and Stuart Law, left, 78 but surely none of them will play for long enough to get to 100. Ricky Ponting has 68, but will have to play until he is 40 to score 32 more at his present rate. When you consider that Marcus Trescothick has only 28 first-class hundreds (14 for England), it is clear that anyone who is going to get to the landmark will have to spend a lot of time, like Ramprakash, not on international duty. There simply aren't the chances for international cricketers. Rob Key, who has scored 35 hundreds, may yet get there but at the age of 28 time is against even him.
Plenty of great batsmen with long careers never crossed the line. Mike Gatting, Maurice Leyland and Gordon Greenidge each played for more than 22 years but could not do it. Ramprakash, 38, has been helped by scoring 18 hundreds in the past two seasons, which twice gave him a season's average of more than 100. Some may say that he has been in such rich form that he should be in the England team.
Graveney told me that he certainly thinks so, but then he may be coloured by his own successful recall to England at the age of 39. That was 40 years ago and cricket was a different game. But how lovely it would be if Ramprakash got his hundredth 100, like Geoff Boycott and Zaheer Abbas, in a Test match. What do you think?
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